The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage?

A generation ago, the late Professor Alfred Cobban used to have four laws for answering an historical question: that the middle classes were always rising, that kings were always short of money, that the peasants were always revolting, and that dictators always drained marshes. The incompetence of President Marcos and others having served to refute the fourth, perhaps the only one of these laws which now survives is that kings were always short of money.

This article is concerned only with the first, the notion of the rising middle classes, the political yeast of historical writing in the 1950s and 1960s. In most periods, this yeast is much harder to find than it used to he. The rise of the middle classes has been chased into later and later periods, until the rise of the working classes has been snapping at its heels, and in some cases, may even be thought to have overtaken it. Together with increasing doubt about the rising middle classes, historians are showing increasing doubt about the dialectical model, in which change comes about by the clash of opposites. This model, as Marx generously admitted, is one we originally owe to Hegel, and its survival has owed as much to Hegelian as to Marxist influence. The Whig version of the origins of the English Civil War, for example, was a clearly dialectical view, and it has come in for heavy criticism in the past fifteen years.

In the 1950s, it was widely assumed that the English Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, but now it appears to many, if not to all, historians that this assumption has not stood the test of time. There is, first, no correlation between class or status on one hand, and loyalty on the other. In modern research, Parliamentarian peers, for example, are figures of great prominence, and Charles I's confidence in Royalist sentiment in the City of London, though in the event misplaced, does not appear unreasonable, His City supporters, though outmanoeuvred, were numerous and powerful.

There is little sign that Parliamentarian support had any bourgeois base of substance. The leading supporters of both sides were gentry, of very much the same social background as each other, and there is no clear correlation between social standing and allegiance. Tawney's belief that the gentry were 'bons bourgeois' has not stood up, If we look for a body of rising merchants driving on the Parliamentary cause, we do not find them. Where we find enthusiastically Parliamentarian towns, such as Boston (Lincs) and Watford, what they have in- common is not their economic base, but the ecclesiastical complexion of their preachers.

The type of crisis that happened, a collapse of the political process at the centre, slowly and painfully exported to the provinces, is not the sort which is easily explained as a consequence of social change. There was little debate and even less disagreement on economic issues, and bills on economic questions were left to moulder without reaching even a Second Reading. There was little change in the social base of those holding power, and in social terms, England in 1660 was very little different from England in 1640. Nor is there much evidence of a social change during the previous century which might help to explain a major political upheaval. The changes which used to be invoked for this purpose seem to fall into three categories. One, including the growth of an active land market, production of food for market, enclosure and mobility of labour, dates, as Alan Macfarlane has shown, from the generation after the Black Death. These changes were nearly 300 years old, and if they created the Civil War, they took an unconscionable long time about it. The second category is of things such as the rise/decline of the gentry, which never happened at all. The third, involving the rise of colonial trade, the growing prosperity of towns and the development of a class of rich merchants, dates from well after the Civil War, and is more likely to have been delayed than hastened by the war.

If the English Civil War was not a bourgeois revolution, we have to consider whether it happened at some other time, or whether it has never happened at all. J.H. Hexter's article on 'The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England', published in 1961, has stood the test of time. Yet so too has the reply by K.G. Davies, called 'The Mess of the Middle Class', which accused Professor Hexter of trying to sweep the mess of the middle class into someone else's territory, and protested that it did not belong in his territory, If there was no bourgeois revolution in 1642, when was there one?

1688 is not a particularly promising candidate. It was organised by a very limited circle of aristocrats and did not even involve the participation of a Parliament until the key events were over. Politically, though it did not eclipse the monarchy as used to be thought, it ushered in a century in which the English aristocracy enjoyed an unusually large share of power. There is little sign of a bourgeois revolution here. The Great Reform Bill of 1832, looks at first sight a little more promising, yet the work of Norman Gash, among others, suggests that in the generation after 1832, the hold of the aristocracy on power was not substantially diminished. Palmerston, for example, will hardly serve for a bourgeois figure.

If we look for 'the rise of the middle classes' since 1870 we have come to an area in which the growth of trade unionism and the rise of the working classes, is already a significant part of the story. In other words, we have come into an area in which we have to ask whether Marx's sequence of development is becoming telescoped enough to risk being reversed. We have also passed the last date at which a rise of the middle classes could possibly be described as a revolution. In fact, we have to ask whether there are some serious flaws in the model.

We should perhaps look first at the part of the model we owe to Hegel: the notion that the process of change happens by the clash of opposites. There is no need to deny that it sometimes does so, but neither the course of English constitutional development nor the course of English social development appears to be a case in point. The past generation's work on the reigns of Charles II and James II suggests that the clash of opposites in the English Civil War did far less to diminish the powers of the monarchy than we used to think. The two events that did most to diminish it seem to have been the French wars under William III, and the priority William gave to financing them, and subsequently, the madness of George III. Neither of these involved a dialectical clash within English history.

If we look for a date for the decline of the English aristocracy, the key period seems to be that of the agricultural depression after 1870. This was caused by the opening up of the American and Canadian West, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad seems to have done more damage to the English aristocracy than any class conflict taking place within England. This, no doubt, is economic change, but it is economic change in which class conflict does not have a prominent place. Moreover, it is a chronological pattern in which political and economic change, are moving so far apart that they have to be regarded as largely independent of each other.

The notion of class solidarity is another major flaw in the traditional Marxist model. Thatcherites standing for working-class constituencies and dukes looking far rich marriages have always known that snobbery is a much more powerful motive than solidarity, and it is one for which the Marxist model leaves very little room. It was in the days of Samuel Smiles, surely the paradigm of the rising middle classes, that the saying was coined that 'the Englishman is a self-made man, and worships his creator'. Economic motives, where they can be found, are as likely to take the form of an individualist scramble to get into the class above as they are to take the form of a solidarity-based drive to raise one's class as a whole. A notion of class which includes the shop steward, but leaves out the foreman, is not based on an accurate picture of the world around us. Mutatis mutandis, the same point could be made for any other century.

Another flaw in the model is that, in its pure and original form, it does not recognise the power of ideas as an independent variable. Ideas do not simply reflect the economic circumstances of their thinkers. Where they do correlate with the economic circumstances of their thinkers, they do so in a way so various that a much more flexible instrument than that of class is needed to explain it. It might be possible to construct an explanation of why Victorian pollbooks show weavers voting Liberal, and butchers voting Conservative, but if so, it is an explanation which would have more to do with industrial psychology than with class conflict. In the English Civil War, people's allegiance normally correlates with their religion, but their religion does not correlate with their social background. Even in areas which were strongly of one persuasion, such as Northampton, we find people like the man who was recommended for a job on the ground that he was 'of Northampton, but I thank God not of that persuasion'. There is no way the material can be explained unless by admitting the autonomy of the mind.

This recognition allows us to see religion as one of the crucial divisive forces in English political life. This remains true from a Reformation which left the country, in all senses, 'but halfly reformed', through the English Civil War into the history of the Whig and Tory parties. When Gladstone, in his High Tory days, opposed the first Reform Bill, his cry was not that it would lead to the abolition of property and privilege: it was the anti-dissenter cry that 'this will lead to the abolition of Christmas'. The picture remains true right down to the 1906 election, dominated by the dispute about church schools on the rates. None of this material can be explained by searches for social background: we must grapple with the ideas.

It is no use trying to explain an 'ideology of the ruling class', because the notion of a 'ruling class' itself has come in for a good deal of questioning. Cynthia Herrup's work on seventeenth-century justice, by starting with the actions of juries rather than of legislators, has shown that the justice actually administered was that of local people administering local values. The whole system of English local government, because it depended on voluntary and unpaid local officers, necessarily administered a system heavily tinged with their values. What they could not believe in was often not done. Whatever the theory, the autonomy of English local government ensured that in some sense, government must be government by consent, and not only by consent of a ruling class.' Simon Jenkins, speaking on television at four in the morning after the General Election of February 1974, remarked: 'The Prime Minister asked a silly question, and he got a silly answer. He asked "who governs?" and he got the answer "nobody".' If the question is put in those terms, the answer holds good for most of English history.

A theory which has been so persistently wrong for all periods up to and including the one in which it was written is unlikely to be more helpful now. The idea of analysing support for Margaret Thatcher, for example, in terms of a search for a 'ruling class' whose ideology it expresses, is an unappealing one. lt would rapidly generate a state resembling an acute hangover. It would surely be more constructive to accept the conclusion to which the historical evidence seems to point. If we once accept that Marx and all his works were a colossal wrong turning in the intellectual history of the West (and now of the East also), then we may be in a position to start again. We may then be in a position to come up with answers based on the evidence. They will be a good deal less simple, and much more multifarious, but that is what the real world is like. When we find that the real world is often more richly comic than any conclusion based on a theory can ever be, we may be in a position to appreciate the ironies in Jane Austen's remark that 'it is odd that history should be so dull, since a great deal of it must be invention'.

• Conrad Russell is Professor of History at King's College, London, and author of The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990).